Paper Eighty-Seven
What Meaning Looks Like When No One’s Counting
It's eleven o'clock on a Thursday evening in December, and I'm on paper eighty-seven of a hundred and twenty.
I could make this easier on myself. I could build a curriculum that grades itself—multiple choice, Scantron, done by nine. I don't. I keep building the kind that asks something of my students, and consequently asks something of me, because I want them walking out of my classroom with more than a grade they'll forget by January. I want them to have wrestled with something, thought about something, perhaps even changed their mind about something. Unfortunately, that means I eventually have to wrestle with, think about, and respond to whatever they hand back to me. Apparently, there are consequences to one's pedagogical convictions.
So here I am at paper eighty-seven, facing the same temptation that showed up at paper eleven and paper sixty and will almost certainly show up again at paper one-nineteen: write something generic. Good effort. Nice work here. Two short, somewhat inane statements, slap the grade on it, and move on. Nobody is checking.
Almost twenty-five years of teaching has taught me that most students look at the number at the top of the page before they read anything I've written underneath it. Some genuinely study the feedback. A smaller contingent wants every point accounted for and approaches the difference between a 96 and a 100 with roughly the intensity of a congressional inquiry. But plenty look at the grade, decide whether they can live with it, and move along.
Which means substantive feedback frequently functions as a message I don't know will ever be opened.
Reality, in other words, was offering me a perfectly reasonable out. Generic feedback wouldn't have cost me anything professionally, and almost nobody would have noticed the difference. But I didn't take it. I went through every paper and tried to identify where the writing worked, where it didn't, where an argument needed more than description, and where some adjustment might sharpen the student's thinking the next time around. I wasn't doing it because every student wanted that level of feedback. I knew many didn't. I did it because some did, and I couldn't know in advance which ones those would be.
That choice cost time—a ridiculous amount of it. It cost evenings I could have spent with the people I love because a hundred and twenty writing-intensive papers don't get read thoughtfully in one sitting, particularly when no teaching assistant is hiding under a desk somewhere. It cost energy I don't get back. And there was something else about the cost that I didn't appreciate until much later: nobody was keeping track of this particular part of how I did my job.
I've handed back grades with almost no comments during leaner semesters and received exactly the response you would expect: nothing. Students accepted the number and moved on. My partner may be the only person on the planet who appreciates what a hundred and twenty writing-intensive papers costs me each December, and that's because she is usually grading her own stack at the same table.
Nobody was keeping score on whether paper eighty-seven got a thoughtful response or the easy one. What I came to understand much later was that the absence of that scoreboard didn't create the meaning. It simply made the source of the meaning harder to confuse with the reward.
Meaning Has to Survive Contact With Reality
Positive psychology has spent a great deal of time talking about happiness, well-being, flourishing, optimism, strengths, and the conditions under which people function well. I have spent much of my own career swimming in those same waters. But the older I get, the less interested I am in happiness as the final destination. Happiness matters, obviously. I enjoy a good day, decent weather, a good meal, finding twenty dollars in a jacket I haven't worn since February. But meaning, to me, is a different animal.
Viktor Frankl understood this under circumstances that make my stack of student papers look almost comically insignificant by comparison. For Frankl, meaning wasn't simply invented to make us feel better about our circumstances. It was something to be discovered, particular to the person and situation, and that discovery required a stance toward what life put in front of us (Frankl, 1959/2006).
Eventually, then, the idea has to be lived.
I can tell myself that teaching matters. I can tell other people my students matter. I can put all sorts of eloquent language around purpose and calling. But sooner or later those ideas encounter paper eighty-seven at eleven o'clock on a Thursday night. That is where the idea meets reality.
Modern meaning research commonly distinguishes among coherence—the sense that life makes sense; purpose—that life has direction; and significance—the sense that life has value and matters (Martela & Steger, 2016). What fascinates me is what happens when those things move beyond interpretation and into behavior. At what point does this matters to me become more than an attractive statement about who I believe myself to be?
The phrase I keep returning to is behavioral engagement with reality.
I don't mean simply doing difficult things. There is no virtue in making life harder than it needs to be. Sometimes the wisest thing a person can do is quit. Sometimes saying no takes more integrity than continuing. What interests me is congruence when there is friction. What happens when something we claim matters meets inconvenience, uncertainty, disappointment, cost, or a perfectly acceptable easier alternative? What happens when there is no audience, no applause, and no guarantee that the choice will produce anything we can point to later as evidence that it was worthwhile?
That is where I have begun thinking about what I would call earned meaning.
I use earned cautiously. I don't mean deserved, as though some people have earned access to meaning and others have not. I mean something simpler: meaning made credible through behavior. Meaning that has survived contact with reality.
Paper eighty-seven didn't matter because grading it was difficult. It mattered because an easier alternative was available, professionally defensible, and almost completely invisible to everyone except me. I knew which choice matched the professor I claimed I wanted to be. That is something different entirely.
The Engine, Not the Fuel
Several ideas I've been building for years begin to fit together here.
The Pile is what accumulates in us—the experiences, interpretations, disappointments, wounds, successes, failures, and assorted psychological debris we carry forward. Narrative Lag is what happens when an old story keeps narrating a life it no longer accurately describes. Self-Permission is the authorization to move beyond what those old conditions predicted. Self-Trust develops as evidence accumulates, one reasonably aligned choice at a time, that we can rely on ourselves to follow through.
Psychological Capital—Hope, Efficacy, Resilience, and Optimism, the HERO framework I've spent a career teaching and noticeably longer trying to live (Luthans, Youssef, & Avolio, 2007)—may be what keeps that process running long enough to matter. It isn't meaning itself, and I don't need to stretch the theory beyond what it was built to do. PsyCap is the engine that helps keep us engaged with reality long enough for meaning to become behaviorally credible.
Hope lets us imagine there's still somewhere worthwhile to go and helps us find another pathway when the obvious one closes. Efficacy gives us enough belief in our capacity to move rather than stand across the room admiring the problem. Resilience keeps us engaged when something fails or simply takes longer than expected. Optimism keeps one bad outcome from becoming the explanation for everything that happens next.
None of that announced itself while I was using it. I wasn't sitting at paper eighty-seven thinking, Ah yes, Gary, excellent deployment of your higher-order positive psychological capacities. I was tired, and I still had thirty-three papers to go.
The resources simply kept me at the table.
Decorative Optimism Doesn't Survive Contact With a Thursday
This helps clarify something that has bothered me for a long time about optimism, particularly the variety sold in popular psychology and self-help.
I think of it as decorative optimism. It says everything will work out. It is cheerful, inexpensive, and asks remarkably little of the person possessing it. It works beautifully while circumstances cooperate and tends to disappear about the same time reality decides not to play along.
That isn't what Psychological Capital means by optimism. Within PsyCap, optimism doesn't operate in isolation from the other HERO resources. Together, the four sound much less like everything is going to be fine and more like this: Reality may not cooperate, but I have psychological resources with which to respond.
That isn't a prediction about outcomes. Reality gets a vote, and anyone who has lived long enough knows it frequently votes against us just to keep things interesting. It is a posture toward reality—a willingness to remain engaged without requiring reality to guarantee the ending first.
The opposite of decorative optimism, then, isn't pessimism. It is psychologically resourced engagement.
I had no language for any of this at paper eighty-seven. I only understood it afterward, which is apparently the direction from which I understand most things.
And that brings me to the part of the story where the sentimental version would normally take over.
Not long after that December, I received an email from a student. I'll leave her unnamed because her words belong to her rather than to this article. She told me the feedback I'd given her on an assignment had genuinely moved her. She had teared up reading it. She wasn't an easy crier, she said, and no professor had ever given her that much detail or thought. My comments had allowed her to learn from what she'd missed rather than simply stare at the grade and wonder what had gone wrong.
It would be easy to make her email the payoff. I could tell you all one hundred and twenty papers suddenly became worthwhile because one student wrote back. That would give the story a lovely emotional bow and make everybody feel warm on the way out.
It would also be wrong.
Her email mattered to me enormously, but it didn't retroactively create the meaning. It was simply the exception that happened to become visible. The other hundred and nineteen papers received the same care, occupied the same evenings, and benefited from the same refusal to type good work and move along. Most will never generate a single word back.
If I had never heard from her, the choice at paper eighty-seven would not have become meaningless. The alignment was already there between what I said mattered and what I did when nobody was checking. Her response simply allowed me to see one consequence of that alignment that otherwise would have remained invisible.
So What Is All This Work For?
Much of my recent work has been circling some version of the same question without my fully recognizing where it was leading. What accumulates in us? What keeps us stuck inside an old story? What allows us to move beyond it? How do we begin trusting ourselves again? How does a human being become someone the original conditions did not predict?
Somewhere underneath all those questions, another one has apparently been sitting there with its arms folded, waiting patiently for me to notice it: What is all of that work actually for?
Surely not just to feel better about the Pile. Not to become endlessly self-aware. Not to develop increasingly sophisticated explanations of why we are the way we are. And certainly not to assemble a psychological highlight reel proving to the world how splendidly evolved we have become.
Maybe part of the answer is that we do the work so that what matters to us can eventually become visible in what we actually do.
Behavioral engagement with reality turns possibility into action. Repeated action becomes evidence. Evidence contributes to self-trust. Somewhere in that process, perhaps some of what we once merely believed becomes meaning we have actually lived—meaning tested enough by reality to carry experiential credibility.
That is what I see when I think back to the stack of papers: the work nobody sees, the evening nobody scores, the choice nobody checks, and the paper nobody but you will ever know got the thoughtful comment instead of the convenient one.
At eleven o'clock that Thursday night, closing the laptop probably would have felt much better. I wouldn't have blamed myself for wanting to. But the question wasn't really whether grading paper eighty-seven would make me happy. It was whether the easy response was consistent with the professor I still said I wanted to be.
That is a less cheerful question, perhaps, but I have come to think it is a considerably more useful one.
Meaning doesn't require every worthwhile act to feel good in the moment, nor does it require the world to reward the act later. It asks whether what we do remains connected to what we say matters long enough for that pattern to become part of who we are.
Another semester will bring another stack, and nobody is going to keep score on that one either.
I'll grade it anyway.
Gary L. Keck is an Associate Professor of Management, Marketing, and Psychology and the author of Everyone Has Their Own Pile of S#!t!: How to Turn Life's Mess Into Psychological Strength. His work focuses on Psychological Capital and applied positive psychology. More at ginkcollective.com.
